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Pixel Scroll 6/19/16 MacArthur’s File Is Posting In The Dark, All The Sweet Green Pixels Scrolling Down

(1) COMPLETE WEAPONS BAN AT SUPERCON. Florida Supercon (July 1-4) will not permit any real or replica weapons to be brought into the con. Includes blades, blunt weapons, whips, tasers, or even things that “cause excessive noise levels like vuvuzelas.”

In light of recent events, we have chosen to tighten security around the event and have recently updated many of the rules. This is done to protect our attendees and make sure that everyone may enjoy the convention without concern.

Florida Supercon is dedicated to the safety and security of ALL attendees.

Use common sense and remember what seems harmless to you may appear like a threat to someone else. All attendees must adhere to Florida State Law at all times during the weekend of Florida Supercon, including laws regarding firearms and weapons. If it is illegal outside of the convention, it is illegal inside the convention.

Please read this entire policy before attending Florida Supercon. Failure to follow this policy may result in your removal from the convention without refund. We have a ZERO TOLERANCE FOR WEAPONS.

This is going to be part pep talk and part “There there, here’s a foot in your ass.”

The Orlando shooting was not your fault. You bear no guilt and no shame. By embracing guilt and shame you give the terrorists what they want. Stop it. That way lies madness….

MAKING YOURSELF MORE HELPLESS HELPS NO ONE. “I don’t need guns,” you say. I know more about guns than you, and you’re wrong. You may not want any, and that’s fine, that’s your decision to make, FOR YOU, not for me, nor anyone else. “I couldn’t have done anything.” You’re right. So stop trying to Monday Morning Quarterback the whole thing. “Nobody needs an AR15.” Again, you’re wrong, and at this point you should be reminded of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Get that? Access to firearms is a constitutionally protected right, and SCOTUS says so, the end.

(3) FINDING DORY FILLS TREASURE CHEST. Yahoo! Movies confirms the latest Pixar film, Finding Dory, set a record for an animated movie, earning many dollars in its worldwide debut.

Some 13 years after Finding Nemo first hit theaters, Pixar and Disney’s sequel Finding Dory made a huge splash, landing the biggest domestic opening of all time for an animated title with $136.2 million from 4,305 theaters….

The previous crown holder for top animated launch was DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third, which debuted to $121.6 million in 2007. Until now, Pixar’s best was Toy Story 3 (2010) with $110.3 million.

Picking up in real-time, ID:R portrays a much different recent history than our own alien invasion-free world. The alternate events that occur following the War of 1996 in Independence Day definitely depict a darker timeline.

The easiest comparison that comes to mind when reading Malka Older’s INFOMOCRACY (Tor/Tom Doherty, $24.99) is to its cyberpunk forebears. There’s an obvious line of inheritance here from William Gibson and Neal Stephenson to Older’s futuristic world of global information networks and cool, noirish operatives vying for power and survival. Yet there’s also an inescapable “West Wing” vibe to the book. This probably owes to the fact that Older is herself a global player, with impressive bona fides in the field of international affairs. This lends the story a political authenticity that’s unusual in the field of cyberpunk, and very welcome.

(6) PULP FIRST CONTACT. James Davis Nicoll explains why he started Young People Review Old Science Fiction.

Young People Read Old SF was inspired by something award-winning author Adam-Troy Castro said on Facebook.

nobody discovers a lifelong love of science fiction through Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore, and directing newbies toward the work of those masters is a destructive thing, because the spark won’t happen. You might as well advise them to seek out Cordwainer Smith or Alan E. Nourse—fine tertiary avenues of investigation, even now, but not anything that’s going to set anybody’s heart afire, not from the standing start. Won’t happen.

This is a testable hypothesis! I’ve rounded up a pool of younger people who have agreed to let me expose them to classic works of science fiction1 and assembled a list of older works I think still have merit. Each month my subjects will read and react to those stories; I will then post the results to this site. Hilarity will doubtless ensue!

Owning a book isn’t the same as reading it; we need only look at our own bloated bookshelves for confirmation. You may remember this great cartoon by Tom Gauld doing the rounds on social media a year or two ago. We love it because, in it, we can clearly see our own bookshelves and our own absurd relationship with books: unread, partially read and never-to-be-read books battling it out for space with those we’ve successfully tackled. With our busy lives and competing demands on our leisure time, the ever-growing pile of unread books can even sometimes feel like a monument to our failure as readers! Although this is surely a more common anxiety in a time of relatively cheap books and one-click online shopping we should be reassured that it’s nothing new: Seneca was vocal in criticising those using “books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining-room”, and in his early 16th century sermons Johannes Geiler (reflecting on Sebastian Brant’s ‘book fool’) identified a range of different types of folly connected with book ownership that included collecting books for the sake of glory, as if they were costly items of furniture1. When we look at our own bookshelves we can fairly easily divide the contents into those we’ve read and those we haven’t. But when it comes to very old books which have survived for hundreds of years how easy is it to know whether a book was actually read by its past owners? ….

Dog-ears

Different readers have different methods of physically marking their reading progress in a book. Once upon a time (I confess!) I was a dog-earer, who turned over the top corner of the page to mark my place; now – evidence of where I do much of my reading – I tend to use a train ticket as a bookmark. In this fascinating blogpostCornelis J. Schilt, editor of the Newton Project, describes how one famous reader of the past, Isaac Newton, used large and often multiple dog-ears to act as mnemonic aides reminding him of specific words and references in books he was reading.

Quite some time ago (nearly two years, I think), I decided I needed a more professional looking website for my writing activities. And it could have all sorts of bells and whistles! Book reviews! Forthcoming publications! Future convention schedules! I could not only move the Lesbian Historic Motif Project to the new site, but I could make it the primary home of my blog. And then it could push content automatically to LiveJournal and Twitter and Facebook. And the LHMP could have improved functionality, with better tagging, and a dynamic index page, and…and everything

Syfy will invade the world’s largest pop culture convention this summer with a three-night telecast directly from the heart of San Diego Comic-Con. The special – Syfy’s first-ever live broadcast from Comic-Con – will air on the network Thursday, July 21 through Saturday, July 23 at 8/7c.

Each night, SYFY PRESENTS LIVE FROM COMIC-CON will bring the Con’s non-stop action directly to viewers across the country, featuring celebrity interviews, breaking news and behind-the-scenes reports. The hosted live broadcast will highlight the biggest stars, top franchise reveals, panel news, exclusive sneak peeks of the hottest films, as well as audience interaction, games, party coverage and much more.

The year 2016 marks what would have been the late Forrest J Ackerman’s 100th Birthday. Famous Monsters and its comic book publishing imprint, American Gothic Press (AGP), are celebrating Forry’s centennial with an original hardcover anthology called TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION, to be released in October at our ALIEN CON event in Silicon Valley, CA!

Famous Monsters is a big name, but we are a small company. Despite our well-known magazine and iconic logo, we are a boutique operation. Still, we manage to make an enduring magazine, cool comic books, neat merchandise, run film festivals, and now are producing a major convention in October. As we spin several creative plates in the air at the same time, we are always mindful of “Uncle Forry” and the imaginative endeavors he championed. For Forry’s centennial celebration, we thought TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION would be a super-cool tribute, but in order to pull it off, we need help! That’s why we are doing FM’s first-ever Kickstarter/crowdfunding effort to cushion the incredible launch costs of such a project (more details at the end under RISKS & CHALLENGES)….

The magical thing about Forry is that he connected people from all fields and industries — be it film, music, comics, or literature. In the spirit of that connection, we have sought to make TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION a truly eclectic offering.

John Carpenter: “For TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION, John Carpenter channels O. Henry in an original short horror folk-tale, “The Traveler’s Tale”. It tells the story of an old British traveler who steals a cursed bejeweled box from a Middle Eastern bazaar. Written by the Horror Master himself!”

William F. Nolan: “His contribution for TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION is ‘the story of how Forrest J Ackerman and the robot from Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS became acquainted.’”

John 5: “He currently plays for Rob Zombie on tour and in the studio. John has also produced numerous solo records — one of which, ‘Careful with that Axe’, shares the title of his story for TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION, a surreal rockstar fable about a Telecaster guitar that seems to give a young boy special powers.”

Richard Christian Matheson: “His short story ‘Barking Sands’ is appearing in TALES FROM THE ACKER-MANSION as illustrated prose”.

Joe R. Lansdale: “His short story ‘The Dump’ is being adapted for the anthology by MARK ALAN MILLER.”

More often than not, this means comic creators throw together as many popular characters as they can get their hands on. It’s good business to throw characters together that no one expects to see sharing a page; companies as adversarial as DC and Marvel have been known to join forces for a good, crazy story. This has led to more than a few fantastic crossover stories over the course of comic book history….

JLA/Avengers

…Arguably the most famous of all crossover comics, JLA/Avengers was actually the result of over thirty years of negotiations between the two companies, as the initial plans had been made in 1979 before plans were put on hold due to editorial differences between Marvel and DC’s higher ups. For a time it seemed as if JLA/Avengers was the sign of more cooperation between the two comics publishers, but there hasn’t been any further successful attempts to unite the two brands since.

211 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/19/16 MacArthur’s File Is Posting In The Dark, All The Sweet Green Pixels Scrolling Down”

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No matter how many times I explicitly distinguish between thought and deed, you insist on re-blurring that line – and this time, you’ve upped the ante by insulting me personally:

You write it off/don’t see it because you unconsciously don’t want to/don’t care/don’t want to rock the boat/whatever your reason is in each situation.

Bullshit. Citation fucking needed. As far as I’m aware, we’ve never been in the same state together, let alone attended the same social event, yet you feel qualified not only to say how I conduct myself, but to psychoanalyze my supposed reasons for the imagined behavior? Fuck. That.

At this point, I can only conclude that you are deliberately trolling, and I have had enough. Good day.

Wait – one last thing. If Hannibal Lecter helped a little old lady cross the street, that would be nice of him. A good deed, even. It wouldn’t change the fact that he’s an evil, twisted, manipulative cannibal – but in that moment, he was decent. People are complicated that way; vanishingly few people are completely good or completely evil. I know it’s inconvenient, and we would all like to imagine that our heroes never stumble and the villains are irredeemable – but reality is messy and shows no inclination to mold itself to suit our wishes. Sometimes good people lose their tempers and bad people show a decent streak. Imagine that.

@ Steve Davidson: On a friend’s Facebook page, someone actually flat-out said that the security guards at the Orlando club “weren’t any good” because they didn’t continue trying to take out the shooter at the risk of innocent people’s lives. “So maybe a few innocent people get shot, isn’t that better than the bad guy taking out 50-odd?” And yes, he was saying that this is what HE HIMSELF would have done if he’d been there.

This subthread started with my personal account – me talking about specific past social encounters – and your reply doesn’t do a damn thing to shift the frame from you-Bob to you-generic-human. As a result, your message looks – and feels – like a direct attack on me, calling me either complicit or oblivious, and either of those is insulting. Forget microaggressions; you went right into actual aggression.

That’s not nice at all, by any definition.

EDIT: I also see that you said “sometimes” without ever quite saying that it applies to this time. Nice little manipulative trick, that.

@Rev Bob
In this case it did apply. Frankly I lost track of the thread and was responding to each comment separately. But let me add a little perspective to my comments if you’d like.

White people frequently don’t notice microaggressions aimed at PoC simply because it’s outside their scope of normal daily things. It takes a fair amount of work to notice the little things. Many, not all, will let slide a number of questionable jokes made when PoC aren’t believed to be present for a slew of reasons some of them quite reasonable.

Men generally don’t notice sexual harassment happening in the office right in front of them because the behavior is still such a common part of our society they just don’t see it. Again for many men it takes training themselves, with help, to see it. Questionable jokes are becoming less acceptable but they still happen and not everyone jumps up and calls someone on them.

Straight people don’t notice many of the microaggressions LGBTI face everyday. Again training and learning to notice is required as its not ones natural state. Jokes are made and not everyone calls out every single time.

So I wasn’t saying anything awful about you. Unless being human is an insult. We don’t see or call out stuff for a variety of reasons, many of them quite good. I’m not perfect and certainly have made big mistakes in the past.

Can we easily tell whose dangerous versus whose just a jerk? No. But I’ve yet to meet anyone who was dangerous who didn’t show their hand in small ways by not being nice/civil/polite to targets or people they considered lower than them in front of the people they respect and/or needed to be respected by. I think you and I are going to disagree as to whether the person appears nice or not.

@Tasha: “In this case it did apply. Frankly I lost track of the thread and was responding to each comment separately. But let me add a little perspective to my comments if you’d like.”

Given the number of times and the eloquence with which you have previously outlined the elements of a proper apology, I cannot help but notice that you have repeatedly and meticulously avoided giving one in this instance. Instead, you have elected to sketch hasty, vague excuses before preaching yet again the virtues of points on which we already agree.

I can’t speak to your experience, but I find it rather common that people stop being (as/at all) nice after being insulted. When they call the offending party’s attention to the transgression and are waved off dismissively instead of given even a token apology, it’s not at all uncommon for rudeness to occur as the result.

@all including Rev Bob
I’m sorry for continuing to engage with Rev Bob. It was out of line and made a thread on File 770 not friendly. I frequently try to calm others when they get locked into a battle of wills going nowhere because there can be no resolution. I will try to stop myself earlier in the process in the future. I wouldn’t mind if a third party stepped in and pointed out I’m spinning my wheels uselessly.

@Rev Bob

I’m not required to hand out a proper apology(TM) ever time I feel a sorry is called for and I don’t do so here on File 770. My proper apologies are more memorable than the more common sorrys I say. Perhaps I should rethink my apology policy so people would stop feeling they are entitled to an apology from me in a certain format or it doesn’t count while they don’t apologize to me when they hurt me. You haven’t apologized to me in the past when you’ve hurt me so it’s kinda ironic your complaining about format.

No matter whether I’m right, for days it’s looked to me like two people who fundamentally agreed about the original topic each insisting on having the last word, and becoming personally affronted because they couldn’t have it.